Cited by 647Ethics and Social Impacts of AIHate Speech and Cyberbullying DetectionTopic Modeling

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 26 of the 35 references it cites were found in a registry or an index; 9 of the 17 sources its claims cite were checked for support.

StereoSet: Measuring stereotypical bias in pretrained language models

Open access
Nadeem, Moin, Bethke, Anna, Reddy, Siva·2021·Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Abstract

Moin Nadeem, Anna Bethke, Siva Reddy. Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2021.

Overview

AI snapshot

Written from the paper’s full text.

TL;DR

StereoSet introduces a large-scale natural English benchmark of 16,995 Context Association Tests across gender, profession, race, and religion to measure stereotypical bias alongside language modeling ability in pretrained language models. It finds that popular models such as BERT, GPT2, ROBERTA, and XLNET show strong stereotypical biases, and that stronger language modeling correlates with greater bias (Spearman ρ = 0.87).

Key findings

  • StereoSet contains 321 target terms and 16,995 test instances (triplets): 8,498 intrasentence CATs and 8,497 intersentence CATs across four domains.
  • All pretrained models evaluated have higher language modeling scores (lms) than RANDOMLM but also exhibit more stereotypical behavior than RANDOMLM (ss = 50). In Table 4, GPT2-large reaches lms = 89.6 and ss = 62.7; ROBERTA-base has ss = 58.5.
  • Language modeling ability and stereotype score are strongly correlated: Spearman rank correlation ρ = 0.87. The ENSEMBLE model is reported as the most biased model (ss = 62.5 in the text; 62.2 in Table 4).
  • SENTIMENTLM achieves a high stereotype score (ss = 60.8) but a lower language modeling score (lms = 65.1), indicating sentiment can help detect stereotypical associations but is insufficient for distinguishing meaningful from meaningless sentences.

Methods

  • The paper designs the Context Association Test (CAT) with two formats: intrasentence fill-in-the-blank and intersentence discourse-level association. Each instance includes a target context and three associations: stereotype, anti-stereotype, and meaningless.
  • Data were crowdsourced via Amazon Mechanical Turk from workers in the United States. Target terms were curated from Wikidata relations for profession, race, and religion, plus gender terms. Each CAT was written by one worker and validated by five others; CATs were retained when at least three validators agreed on labels, yielding 83% of collected CATs.
  • Models evaluated include BERT, ROBERTA, XLNET, and GPT2. Evaluation uses likelihood-based and pseudo-likelihood-based scoring, with metrics: language modeling score (lms), stereotype score (ss), and idealized CAT score (icat). For intersentence tasks, Next Sentence Prediction heads were trained for models lacking them.

Limitations

  • The paper states that evaluating full language modeling ability is beyond its scope, that StereoSet has no training set by design, and that neutral associations were discarded because crowdworkers had low inter-annotator agreement and often produced implicitly stereotypical sentences.
  • The paper states that achieving ideal StereoSet performance does not guarantee a model is unbiased, that icat is not intended as the sole criterion for model selection, and that further research is needed; it also notes lack of computing resources to train the same model on increasing amounts of corpora.
  • Evident from the text: the dataset is US English and collected only from US crowdworkers, so the stereotypes are tailored to the United States; it covers only four domains; validation retains CATs with as few as three of five agreeing validators; and some reported numbers differ between the narrative and tables (e.g., GPT2-large lms/ss and ENSEMBLE ss), which may complicate interpretation.

Model-written summary. Check it against the paper before relying on it.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.416

Cites

26 of 35 references verified0 citation errors · 9 not checkable

Statistics

Nothing to recompute.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

34 Own result · 8 Own interpretation · 6 Partly supported · 6 Own method · 5 No basis given · 1 Supported · 1 Supported so far · 1 Sources not found · 1 No full text of the sources · accuracy not yet measured

Show all 37 claims

  • Probably not a substantial claim. 17
  • It may state two separate claims as one. 14
26 of 26
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Stereotypes could change based on the country.

    “We restrict ourselves to crowdworkers in USA since stereotypes could change based on the country.”
  • The authors state this as an assumption.

    Language modeling ability and stereotypical bias are of equal importance for model comparison.

    “we introduce a simple point-estimate called the idealized CAT (icat) score for model comparison assuming equal importance to language modeling ability and stereotypical bias.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The real world distribution of corpora likely reflects stereotypes.

    “The correlation between lms and ss is unfortunate and perhaps un- avoidable as long as we rely on the real world distribution of corpora to train language models since these corpora are likely to reflect stereotypes.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    BERT has been trained with a Next Sentence Prediction classification head to provide p(s|c), while the other models have not.

    “While BERT has been trained with a Next Sentence Prediction classification head to provide p(s|c), the other models have not.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The stereotypes elicited from US crowdworkers are representative of stereotypes in the United States.

    “StereoSet is in English and is tailored for the stereotypes that exist in the United States.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The NSP classifier's accuracy on a Wikipedia-derived corpus means it can measure language modeling ability on StereoSet.

    “Our results are comparable to Devlin et al. (2019), with each model obtaining 93-98% accuracy against the test set of 3.5 million examples.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The sentiment classifier's accuracy on movie reviews means it can classify sentiment in StereoSet.

    “Our fine-tuned model achieves an 92% test accuracy on the Large Movie Review dataset.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Human agreement scores in Table 10 are a proxy for most and least biased terms.

    “see Table 10 for humanagreement scores, a proxy for most and least biased terms”
8 of 8

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4 of 4

Citations

Cites

Show all 15 references

Research works printed but not linked: 1

  1. Andrew L. Maas, Raymond E. Daly, Peter T. Pham, Dan Huang, Andrew Y. Ng, and Christopher Potts. 2011. Learning word vectors for sentiment analysis. In Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 142-150, Portland, Oregon, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.

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Metadata

Authors
Nadeem, M., Bethke, A., & Reddy, S.
Affiliations
  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)
  • University of California, Santa Barbara (US)
  • University of Cambridge (GB)
Venue
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Published
2021
Pages
5356-5371
OpenAlex
W3019416653
Cited by
643
References
15
Citations by year
2026: 70 · 2025: 131 · 2024: 98 · 2023: 191 · 2022: 85 · 2021: 49
FWCI
95.35
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Locations
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
Keywords
stereotypical bias, pre-trained language models, gender stereotypes, language model evaluation

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